My MIL is 78 and has dementia. She lives in an assisted living flat owned by a housing association.
About three times now in the last six months we have had a phone call from her to say she's on the floor and can't get up and we've had to go round and pick her up. Fortunately on all of these occasions she has been in the front room and managed to drag herself across the room to the phone although she did fall once before in the garden and break her wrist but managed that time to get herself up. I think it's fair to say she has a history of falls. She also fell before she moved to this flat and broke her hip; this precipitated the move since she was in a first floor flat with no lift before. (She does have a pendant btw but sometimes she forgets to put it on, sometimes she loses it in the flat and sometimes she just can't remember what it's for.)
She has the kind of front door where you pull the handle up and lock it with a key. Recently she has started leaving the key in the lock, which means it can't be unlocked by us from the outside in an emergency. All our attempts to get her not to do this have been in vain. We also wanted to get a keysafe for emergency services in case she falls when we are not at home, otherwise we can't go very far at all but, obviously, if she's left her key in the door that will be useless.
We contacted her HA to request they change her lock for safety reasons to one where you just turn a knob inside to lock it instead of using a key and they said it's chargeable. Ok. But they want to charge her £180 just to come and look at it! She's on a state pension and has no savings to speak of so this would be a lot of money to her. They also said that they have to do it, we can't do it ourselves or get someone else to do it and, what's more, if the door has to get kicked in because she's on the floor and locked in, she'll be charged for that too.
AIBU to be completely gobsmacked by this? Or are they BU? And if it's not me, any idea what my next move should be??